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20220416

I finally assembled the Arradio revision I’ve been working on for a month. Its a great piece of gear and the revision adds a lot to the original. The reception using a SMA connector and telescope antenna is way better than with the RCA connector that the original used, the latch toggle works as expected and the tuning is very accurate. The module is skiff friendly and 4hp wide (2hp smaller then the original). I named the revision “Radio Kid” so that if the design has problems it will not be mixed with the original Arradio. I’ve had very positive exchange with the designer of the original and I hope they will approve of my revision.

It took while for the PCB to arrive and I had made mistakes which took some figuring out (pot-reversed, missing 100k transistor). I will rework the PCB design to fit some components better. The U.FL-R-SMT(10) connector is in the way of the RCA connector, which isn’t a problem if only the SMA/antenna is used but it is an easy fix. The panel holes need to be moved a millimetre to the left because the bottom-pcb solder-points are too close to the edge of the unit. The optional RCA connector space is too tight and I want to design a narrow (2hp) panel (also in 1u) which can be used as an alternative mount the antenna, so that it wont be in the way.

I’m really happy that the panel design works as well as it does. The SMA mount hole was made by milling a C shape that can be snapped off to fit the connector. I placed credits to Arradio (and Befaker) on PCB as silkscreen. For the next revision I will make silkscreen drawing of a kids hand toggling a radio tuner in the back of the PCBs. I credited the revision design to Ore.e Refineries.

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20220412

Visited the Tuulensuun lähteikkö [Windmouth Spring Opening] in Vantaa (N=6685977.209, E=386036.606). It flows to Krakanoja (ditch) and further to Vantaan river and is featured in Vantaan virtavesiselvitys [Vantaa Current Flow] (2010) Aki Janatuinen. It’s the same site which Tea visited to collect water for the artwork they presented at the Huokoinen ele exhibition in Artsi. The spring opening is located at the east bank of the Krakantie living area, in a small forest behind a Lidl, a highway and apartment buildings. A very urban site. I accessed the water via an abandoned well and accidental dropped some soil to the spring while prying the lid, so the taste was a bit muddy. A rough translation from the document offers details of the site.

The spring opening is an 1x1m open pool, surrounded by a 5x5m mossy & wet swampy patch. The water in the pool is clear and around it you will find ten separate spring vortexes which move the sand on the spring base. The water was 7,1°C degrees even when the temperature outdoors was 20°C. This spring opening is the finest and most valuable site discovered during the survey and unlike other sites which were observed, the water is clear. Northeast of it, there is a well (constructed on top of a spring) and the water from these sites forms a very valuable nature site (also including a separate small wet patch to the east). The entire area might include rare plants and insects, which are specific to the spring habitat. The spring is “natural”. Northeast of it is a “sister-spring” which has been made into a well. The well might be threatened by construction as the area is designated for apartments. Building initiatives could have an impact on the “natural” spring opening and the Krakenoja area which depends on their flow.

Beyond the Flesh and the Real (2020) Morgan. A cyberpunk-transsexual celebration of vocoders as an emancipatory technology. Spotted the article via the sacred cyborg harmony script release thread on llllllll.

We reshape our flesh at will – at least, within the limits of our position within racial capitalism and our ability to navigate Byzantine healthcare systems set up to murder us – and in this way we are the most obvious manifestation of modernity, or so the argument goes. As Preciado has more than amply demonstrated in Testo Junkie, cis people chemically and surgically alter their genders just as much as trans people do, but of course their participation in the pharmacopornographic regime doesn’t attract the same fascination and revulsion.

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20220408

The difference between performance art and live-art is class. Live-art is favoured by artists from or aspiring to middle-classes and performance art is for the poor. Performance art is customer service, job hunting, busking and haggling. Live-art is choreography, dialogue and contracts.

I’m still scorned by COVID period setbacks, the impact of restrictions and control measures. Trying to read but I can’t do much work. The peak of the pandemic toggled my sense of agency and Russia’s attack to Ukraine is continuing the same. I feel irrelevant and detached.

Still awaiting a pcb shipment for the Arradio revision.

Clap in many synths Ive listened to is not a clap it is a tap as from the dance. I think many of my favourite claps would be better defined as taps. They have a woody element and a double tap is often used for emitting a sense of space. Doing double taps is easier then double claps.

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20220325

Companies partially owned by the Finnish state, most notably Fennovoima Ltd. nuclear power company established by Russian state’s nuclear company Rosatom, where grounded by the premise that business interactions would advance democratic development in Russia. The plan was that free trade would boost the emergence of a free society.

It seems they sincerely believed that investments between state corporations, would foster good will between nations. Turns out the investments the Finnish state made for establishing infrastructural ties, have been pocketed and used for amassing even more authoritarian power.

Peace and democracy do not trickle down, they are built from the ground up. Next time, we must invest in actual peace work, cultural exchange and grass root democracy initiatives.

If one or two of the hundreds of billions of euros Finland has wasted in advocating free trade, would have been used for establishing independent cultural exchange –between Russian and Finnish democracy activists, cultural workers and grass roots activist– we could imagine an easier path out of this mess.

Despite our proximity to Russia, Finland has failed in establishing institutions which could reach Russians. At this moment we would need to offer Russians a promise of an alternative and means to achieve change. I don’t think Russians will stand against their current regime due to economic sanctions. Having the right to consume is not a freedom or right worth fighting for.

The same premise is at the core of EU: Trade is presented as means for peace. Why are EU countries selling weapons and weapons systems? We need to do better. War is be made impossible because people make it impossible.

Finland wasted 600-700 million in this (now cancelled) project.

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20220315

– Well,  [David] Tudor was one of my first customers. [John] Cage and Tudor visited me at my studio in Berkeley and I remember that occasion. My studio at that time was ten feet wide and I worked out on the sidewalk. It was so crowded in there we hauled the workbench out on the sidewalk on good days and set up my oscilloscope and worked out there. Cage came by and for voltage control I had hooked up my keyboard to an FM module that I’d built, a little module that was an FM receiver and I could play stations on it because I had one of the first veractor tuned FMs. Cage, as you can imagine was, just enormously interested in the fact that I could tune each key to a station and then proceeded to play the radio. I had already met Cage while putting together some of his pieces that involved perhaps multiple radios, phonographs and so on. At that time, in fact the first instrument that he encountered that I had built was a device that gave you a pitch according to where you were along the sound beam. Add it was a guidance device for the blind. At that time I was working a lot with prosthetics for the blind and Cage played it as a musical instrument in this piece and then later on saw my voltage control tuner. He didn’t actually purchase one. I’m not sure that I was offering it for sale in fact. But David Tudor came along with him and commissioned a sound locator that was based on a very beautiful Aztec-looking design. Four circular motifs in which you played a five-channel sound system. Four speakers in the corners of the room and a fifth directly overhead. That was my way of making a equal interval polyhedron. Not taking care of the bottom but certainly the top and Cage bought that and the rather complex voltage controlled amplifier that it controlled to distribute sounds and he used in a number of pieces. I believed he used it in a early version of the Rain Forest Piece.

– Do you recall the date of that?
– I have a hard time with years to tell you the truth.

– The 60s of course?
– Oh early or mid sixties .

– What was the war doing?
– This was early 100 series stuff.  By ’69 I had abandoned the 100 series so it would be around ’66.

Extract from 1991 Buchla tape transcription from the Steina and Woody Vasulka archives.

I submitted a PCB design revision of the Arradio module to a factory. Made the design using KiCad and called the unit Radio Kid. The revision uses a different FM radio submodule, includes reverse voltage protection, the output has a 1k buffer, the board is fitted with a U.fl-smt-1(01) connector for a SMA antenna connector (optionally mounted on the panel), the circuit includes a “latch-toggle” which prevents the tda7088 locking to FM channels and it is 2hp smaller then the original. Small changes to the original design, yet milestone in for my electronics hobby.